Abiro - Mobile News

Final entry

2010-05-05T20:27:00.001+02:00

This is my final entry in this blog, promise.

I conclude it has made me neither rich nor famous, so I guess I can do better things with my time.

It also times well with Blogger’s closing down of publishing via FTP.

I’ve narrowed down my Internet footprint to LinkedIn and Facebook, so if you want to be my buddy there, just let me know.

HP acquires Palm

2010-04-28T22:21:00.001+02:00

As previously rumored and expected: HP to Acquire Palm for $1.2 Billion - TradingMarkets.com

I’m sure HP will continue developing and selling WebOS based phones, but will WebOS survive in the long run?

50k apps in Android Market

2010-04-26T21:37:00.001+02:00

Impressive: a raw estimate now says the mobile app store has added 10,000 more apps within at least a few weeks, if not sooner.

Android Market passes 50,000 apps – Electronista

I’m wondering why so many are so worried about the fact that App Store has so many more applications. How many applications will you ever use, and how many applications are distinctively different, and how many are really useful (as in, not complete crap)?

When magazines go online

2010-04-20T16:26:00.001+02:00

I read a note about the free and ad-financed weekly magazine Metro Sweden, that supposedly gets most of its revenue from its recruitment and education portals, and this has generated $1.5M more profit than last year. Other online magazines follow the same pattern.

Hence online magazines more and more become portals to interactive services. The old notion of magazines providing only news and gossip, and being complemented with ads, seems very outdated overall, so this is a sign that magazines are still innovating and stretching the boundary of what a magazine is.

Google Android vs Apple iPhone

2010-04-18T16:25:00.001+02:00

Samsung, LG, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, HTC, Huawei and more all have and will have Android phones and they will be available at very attractive price points, making it obvious for operators to promote them in bundled subscriptions. Nokia/Intel will compete with MeeGo, but I actually see a problem for Nokia to compete on the smartphone market, unless they sponsor application development.

In my mind the biggest issues for Android compared to iPhone are device fragmentation and the crappy Android Market.

Can Android Overtake the iPhone- - Tim Bajarin - PCMag.com

Apple Against the World – PCWorld

Microsoft goes social with Kin phones

2010-04-18T16:17:00.001+02:00

This is the first time Microsoft provides phones under their own name. Previously they offered Windows Mobile (under many different names over time) to phone manufacturers.

It’s also the first time I’ve seen them endorsing everyday / casual use rather than corporate ditto, which is the right move. The corporate smartphone market is very small in comparison.

The Kin phones are focused on social networking, information access and multimedia, with integrated Zune support.

BBC News - Microsoft debuts 'social' phone

Microsoft's Kin Phones- Super Social and Super Confusing - Lance Ulanoff - PCMag.com

Mobile phones, the new social tool

2010-04-18T16:07:00.001+02:00

As hinted about elsewhere on this site, mobile phones are excellent for communication, as you always have access to one, it’s always on, and people can even tell where you are at (if you allow that), it has a instant-use photo and video camera, etc.

It’s also clear that they are excellent for social networking, for the same reasons:

How are Mobile Phones Changing Social Media- - Flowtown (@flowtown)

Top 10 Expectations Of Social Media In 2010

Cell Phones- The 7th Mass Media - Cellphones.org

Volcanoes and air travel don’t mix

2010-04-18T15:58:00.001+02:00

This is a sure sign of how sensitive our society is:

Air travel has to be shut down in Northern Europe as volcanic ash from the volcano on Iceland destroys air plane motors. That has inhibited 10s of thousands of people from flying, and secondly it risks making air travel companies go bankrupt as they’ve been under pressure for a long time already, possibly decreasing the amount of such companies and also decreasing goods that go by air for a long time.

For more on the volcano eruption, see here:

BBC News - Volcano erupts in south Iceland

Iceland volcano could have world consequences - Science- msnbc.com

Volcano in Iceland grounds hundreds of transatlantic flights

Iceland Volcano Ash Shuts Down Europe Air Travel

Huawei and Qualcomm coming to Lund

2010-04-14T00:54:00.001+02:00

Considering it’s not going so well for Sony Ericsson at the moment, this is good news for the region. Huawei will set up a mobile phone development lab, so there will be good opportunities for management and engineering jobs.

Twitizer – feeling the pressure

2010-04-13T21:23:00.001+02:00

Twitizer has become a bit more popular, which means the server gets more strained, so I added transparent caching of all thumbnail images today.

I also added a “most popular” function to the home and Timeline pages, that counts the views of landing page accesses.

Right now the performance of my web host is pretty bad (read: disastrous), but hopefully the improvements will show their real value tomorrow.

About world domination

2010-04-12T18:39:00.001+02:00

About stopping access to iPhone APIs via frameworks (provided I fully understand the change): Stop The Madness Steve Jobs!

What is the reason for this? My theory is that Apple wants to disallow porting platforms in general, as they make porting between iPhone and competing platforms too easy: If you can easily develop applications for both iPhone and e.g. Android, it’s easier for consumers to go for Android. The applications is what drives future smartphone sales.

I’m just guessing, but this is clearly done for a higher cause (helping Apple stay competitive in the mobile scene), not to piss off small developer companies. That’s just collateral damage.

Update

This is the official statement from Steve Jobs, that I can somewhat understand:

Apple Vs Adobe: Steve Jobs Responds

“We’ve been there before, and intermediate layers between the platform and the developer ultimately produces sub-standard apps and hinders the progress of the platform.”

So I wasn’t completely off stating that it’s the porting platforms (e.g. MoSync) that is the issue here.

1 down, probably…

2010-04-12T18:17:00.001+02:00

I previously predicted that Palm and Microsoft would lose out on the smartphone market, and it seems Palm is the first one to go. Nothing’s conclusive so far of course, but here’s a sign.

Palm Said to Tap Goldman, Quattrone to Find Buyers

IDC on mobile phone statistics

2010-04-11T10:58:00.001+02:00

A summarized version of the stats in IDC: Worldwide Mobile Phone Market Grew 11.3% In Q4 – Update:

provider	shipped	last year	share	last year	margin	last year
Nokia	126.9M	113.1M	39%	38.7%	?	?
Samsung	68.8M	52.8M	21.1%	18.1%	?	?
LG	33.9M	25.7M	10.4%	8.8%	1.3%	8.4%
Sony Ericsson	14.6M	24.2M	4.5%	8.3%	23%	15%
Motorola	12M	19.2M	3.7%	6.6%	?	?
Others	69.1M	57.4M	21.3%	19.5%	?	?
Total	325.3M	292.4M	100%	100%	?	?

Even though Apple, HTM and RIM don’t have enough market share to show up in this list, they should have pretty good margins. Especially Apple that supposedly has the same net profit as the other mobile phone providers together.

More on smartphones / converged devices here: Worldwide Converged Mobile Device Market Grows 39.0% Year Over Year in Fourth Quarter, Says IDC.

Making charts an art

2010-04-07T21:07:00.001+02:00

A few interesting charts I found at Chart of the Day:

Smartphones to overtake featurephones at the end of 2011?
“the next year and a half is a critical land grab for the smartphone market. Apple, Research In Motion, Google, Microsoft, Nokia, and Palm are all duking it out to capture share.”

Apple’s healthy profit
”While Apple has just 7% of the share of revenue (of the PC market), it's grabbing 35% of the operating profit”

Mobile networks are speeding up fast

iPhone rules on apps
”Apple currently has about 170,000 apps available”

Many are called to the iPhone app business

Apple “owns” Google and RIM on patents

Mobile evolution in pictures

2010-04-07T19:57:00.001+02:00

Here’s a revealing picture of the dramatic evolution mobile technology and usage patterns have had in just 9 years.

WHAT’S HAPPENED WITH CELL PHONES THIS DECADE?

$200 for the iPhone is not right. It’s rather something like $600 if you take out the operator subsidy from the equation, and the independent phone price is the only relevant figure. Certainly, you can buy very inexpensive phones today, but the iPhone is not it.

1500 new applications sent in to App Store per day is amazing!

It’s stated as a surprise that as many as 50% of young adults never use landline. I’m surprised so many still use landline at all, as it has so many drawbacks.

The risk of death is apparently much higher from driving while texting/speaking than from micro waves cooking the brain, but the jury is still out on the latter (not that anyone seems to bother anymore).

That the mobile phone would become a major tool for access to digital communities (nowadays called social networks, but it’s really the same thing, better packaged) I predicted several years ago, but now we have a generation that takes that concept for granted.

When killing is not kosher

2010-04-07T19:28:00.001+02:00

Update 20100409: If you didn’t get enough: Iraq War Vet: "We Were Told to Just Shoot People, and the Officers Would Take Care of Us"

My point really is, it’s never kosher to kill people, and certainly not civilians in the hundreds of thousands, that are supposedly the ones needing protection from the bad guys in the first place. And US soldiers are not the bad guys, right?

Iraq slaughter not an aberration

“90% of what occurs in that video has been commonplace in Iraq for the last 7 years, and the 10% that differs is entirely based on the fact that two of the gentlemen killed were journalists.”

What is the real death toll in Iraq?

I know, I should focus on talking about mobile stuff, but the fact that this war still goes on, now also including Afghanistan and potentially Iran, and where USA is to blame even for the fact that there are terrorists in this region in the first place, is a million times more important. Ask yourselves, why does Al-Qaeda hate USA so much?

I know, shit happens to people across the world, Darfur being a prime example, but one occasion doesn’t defend another, and systematic killing is never an wise choice.

‘nough said, hopefully (but not likely).

Wake up world!

Never be religious (whatever the topic)

2010-04-06T11:40:00.001+02:00

I’ve learned the hard way that it’s no point in getting religious over a prediction. Early on I realized mobile phones would be information- and application-centric, but made the mistake that it would happen already with phones supporting MIDP.

Phone manufacturers introduced MIDP support from the side, not changing the phone UI per se, nor the customer’s perception of the phone: it was still voice-centric. It was also almost impossible to find the application you had just installed, and most people didn’t even know their phones cold run applications, due to lack of a common cross-brand way of downloading MIDlets. The saving graze has been the sheer volume of phones running MIDlets (pretty much all featurephones).

I also then complained about the fact that Sun didn’t provide the MIDP implementations, but rather licensed out that right to other providers. That and other things created a fragmentation hell that was almost impenetrable, now requiring frameworks like MoSync and similar to navigate.

The iPhone has yet not had that problem, as there’s practically only one phone model. Android will be somewhere in between, with manufacturer-specific UIs (but hopefully not specific application APIs), vastly differing screen resolutions and phone feature sets, so frameworks are needed also there to achieve effective application development.

Another one of those “Why didn’t I think of that?”

2010-04-02T12:28:00.001+02:00

I guess you’ve seen the onslaught of “blogs” that get popular via Digg, and that contain different kinds of funny pictures and videos. There’s e.g.

Also recently http://bobshouseofvideogames.com/ that’s been referred to from Failblog, etc etc.

This is not so strange, as all those sites are owned by the same company, Pet Holdings. As always the question is why a company would set up such sites, as there are no member fees involved etc? It’s surely not for the fun of it. Well, of course it’s to drag in people to generate ad revenue.

What makes it extra “Heureka”-like is:

The sites are hosted as basic Wordpress blogs, so there’s no work involved in the technology. A new site, on a new domain, could be set up in hours.
Users submit the pictures and videos, not the site owners.

Hence, the site owners do pretty much nothing except collect ad revenue. Sure, they give away $50 now and then to those that win in category contests, but that’s about it.

I’m sure many will try to copy the success of Pet Holdings and many will fail miserably because no one will ever know of your sites. Hints:

Push samples to Digg, and maybe (just maybe) some will be digged (?) enough to show up for people to go to your site.
Try to plug for your own sites via contributions to Pet Holdings sites. Yet, if everything “rhymes” business-wise such contributions would be removed for competitive reasons.

Pet Holdings could experiment with all kinds of category sites for pretty much no cost, as they would initially be advertised via the other category sites.

SMS loans, don’t get me started

2010-03-30T21:33:00.001+02:00

There are several business practices I consider “guaranteed terminal vacation in hell”-worthy for those involved, and it seems some people can go to any length to make themselves rich, without any consideration for their customers or common sense morals, and they seem to be hard to penalize too.

SMS loans must be one of the worst, that has any relation to mobile technology. Here’s an example, that’s been discussed recently (link to a note in Swedish) in my home country Sweden:

Example: A 30 day loan of 50 € (10 SEK = 1 € almost exactly, so I converted to €):

The customer pays back in total 87 € for those 50, provided there are no delays..
The company charges 6 € for two mandatory SMSs sent to the customer. You know what an SMS costs, so this is all margin.
The yearly interest is 65% if the loan is not paid in time.
There’s a delay fee of 20 €.
They charge 5 € for the delay notice.
If you enter information incorrectly they charge 50 € extra.

This company’s roof is 300 € per loan, which says something about what kind of shortsighted and repetitive loans this is used for. The only advice I can give to anyone is: Never take an SMS loan. Never, ever, ever…

In USA credit cards seem to be the real killers, where people often use the credit to the full (what a concept! simple advice: never use the credit on your credit card!). In Sweden it seems SMS loans have the same destructive function, but maybe they are successful (business-wise that is) everywhere.

This business is in dear need of some regulation.

Other movie oddities

2010-03-30T15:29:00.001+02:00

If you are the male protagonist in a romatic comedy or drama, the likelihood that you are an architect or working in media is very high.
If you are a loser out of money or have been a family man / soccer mom for a long time, the likelihood that you have an old Swedish car is pretty high.
However hard you hit anybody, they will not get disabled, they will only slightly die.
Guns have at least 100 rounds of ammunition, and if you eventually run out, the gun is so worthless that you throw it away,
If you get hit by a bullet, blood will mysteriously explode from your body.
If you shoot at a car it will explode in a huge fire ball.
Whenever there’s a dangerous scene you will be mysteriously replaced by another person or CGI.
Almost all events in the world take place around Los Angeles or at least in USA.
Steven Seagal and Uwe Boll still make movies.

Anecdote: Computers in movies

2010-03-30T11:29:00.001+02:00

I’m home curing a flu, so it’s fitting to write an anecdote:

Noted about uses of computers in movies:

CDs/DVDs are almost always inserted up-side-down. What's the thing about that? Because they are more shiny that way?
Almost all laptops are Macs. What does Apple pay for that? Supposedly not much. Why not? This trend is starting to show up also with mobile phones, where iPhones are often used.
When something is encrypted it's shown as scrambled symbols on the screen.
It’s somehow very easy to guess passwords by looking at books in the room or knowing a person’s interests. I realize in some cases this is true, but how often is 2 to 3 tries enough to hack a system?
If a server loses power somehow all screens go dark, even though they are clearly not hooked up directly to the server, but rather connected to networked computers.
Viruses turn off all screens after some flickering, as if the video cable is loose.
The mouse is almost never used. Rather people write all the time, as if the computers were old teletypes.
Computer experts are über-nerds/geeks and with arguable morals. Extreme cases: Die Hard 4.0, Jurassic Park and War Games. Similar in games: F.E.A.R., Deus Ex.
Laptops are almost always run on batteries, even though in an office setting that’s very rarely the case.
Computers often use speech synthesis when a user queries a computer, even though it’s a very awkward way to present information and hardly ever used. Also, if the computer is losing power somehow, the voice is getting slower and slower (2001 is a good example).
Even though a computer uses an advanced multi-touch screen you have to move data between computers via a disc, and the only way to securely watermark information is to engrave it on wooden balls. (Minority Report)
To be able to view virtual representations of people you need at least 20 screens, and the coded information of people is in Katakana (Matrix).

This is just a short list of oddities. Computers are rather dull from a visual point-of-view, so I understand directors go beyond reality to make it more interesting, but isn’t it time computers are considered just everyday tools, also in movies (see e.g. Avatar)? We all know what it means to copy a file etc.

Some success at Sony Ericsson PlayNow

2010-03-28T16:49:00.001+02:00

Converter Pro is supposedly one of the most popular downloads in the Applications category right now. EasyCall is also on the list.

Collage of mobile-related news

2010-03-22T21:39:00.001+01:00

Juniper Research: Can 2010 be the year of the low cost Smartphone?
That’s at least what Android phone providers want.

Juniper Research: Mobile VoIP is here to stay, expect more mVoip alliances
Don’t count on it. As more and more get flatrate data subs, there’s no need for Skype etc to collaborate with operators.

Juniper Research: Web 2.0 Mobile Revenues to Reach $18.9 billion by 2014, driven by Presence and Social Web
It says presence-enabled services will dominate. I don’t believe that at all. It’s been talked about for many years, but just look at how supposedly presence/status-oriented services like Twitter and Facebook are used for completely different things. Sure, there are still people writing “I’m eating an ice cream” kind of messages, but absolutely nobody cares. Also, the only way real presence services can work is if they are automatic, e.g. knowing whether I can be contacted or not, or where I am. Also, ads and applications will generate revenue, not the services themselves very much. Few will pay for using mobile social services, similar to the PC usage pattern.

Mashable: Mobile App Market to Surge to $17.5 Billion by 2012 [STUDY]

eWeek: 10 Ways Google Can Defend Its Android Turf Against Apple iPhone
There’s another way: Make phones that more want to buy. Apple iPhone is still a niche phone. Put Android in a broader range of phone form factors and price ranges, yet very importantly: Secure that apps work on all those phones without modification. Android is in the fragmentation risk zone already, and there are still very few phones on the market. Wait a year, without controlling efforts from Google or availability of “cushioning” porting toolkits, it will be a fragmentation hell.

BD-Live, first impression

2010-03-22T20:46:00.001+01:00

I just set up my home cinema and tried out Warner Brothers BD-Live site. It was completely void of any content whatsoever. What about trailers for all your movies? Just a hint. Not very farfetched though.

Vodafone drops Wayfinder

2010-03-16T22:23:00.001+01:00

Wayfinder was one of the pioneers in using mobile phones for navigation instead of dedicated GPS navigators, and were acquired by Vodafone a couple of years ago.

This note indicates Vodafone will either sell off or completely lay Wayfinder to rest (?) due to the competition from free services.

There’s a considerable market for professional mapping services for e.g. fleet management, and Vodafone has many corporate customers, so just closing it down doesn’t sound too well thought out.

TheWhereBusiness: Free nav spells the end for Wayfinder